Summary

With its razzle-dazzle wordplay and kaleidoscope of subjects, Sonnet L'Abbe's second collection of poems is a tour-de-force. L'Abbe invents her own unique poetics, coupling a glittering variety of patterns with tumbling rhythms and rhymes. And with this refreshed language, she reconsiders all the rules for twenty-first-century life. The poems work like a whirlwind, ranging from the intimacy of infancy to the shock of whole civilizations razed by war, and are infused with a political undertone that reveals a child's emerging understanding of identity, of specific citizenship, of bodies physical and psychological, of language, imagination, and dream. Whether funny or funky, candid or subtle, amused and ironic or stunned in fright, the poems are guided by a fierce intelligence that never oversimplifies the world. Killarnoe, the poet tells us, "is a place I invented right now. I just built it from my head." And in its reconsideration of what it means to be,Killarnoeis fascinating, charged, and inspired.

Author Biography

SONNET L’ABBÉ won The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize in 1999, and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35, in 2000. Her first collection of poetry was A Strange Relief (M&S, 2001).

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Excerpts

OH

(((((o)))))

this o is my throat
this o is my oh yeah
this o is my really
this o is my credulousness

((((o))))

this o is my soundful closed
this o is my politeness
this o is my mask
this o is my feigned interest

(((o)))

this o is my I see
this o is the shared place
this o is my sympathy
this o is my mistake

((o))

this o is my aha
this o is my incredulousness
this o is my startling backward
this o is our otherness

(o)

this o is just o
this o is symbolic sound
this o is the presence of nothing
this o is common ground

o

this o is my lips
this o is my gentle kiss
this o is my suckling
o my greedy tenderness

oh
uh-oh
oh

A Word about the Poem by Sonnet L’Abbe
One of the interests I explore in Killarnoe is the unspoken relationship of phonemes (basic units of sound in language, like “ah,” or “sh,” or “uh”) to meaning. There’s an intuitive connection between the feeling elicited in the body when pronouncing a word and its signification. For example, the pristine sound of “ee” suggests a clean, free motion or a scream, while the hollow sound of “oh” suggests something lower, something whole and orblike.

I’m also interested in how these sounds get coded culturally, in what “sounds foreign” to Canadian ears. Where bazaars are common, names with “z” aren’t bizarre, but what does it mean to be named Aziz or Zalena here?

How the Poem Works by Margaret Christakos
Living in parentheses is resisted through utterance, on the wing’s highest heart and at language’s most inner pitches, so that the reverberations of that tiniest of bon mots signifies the radiance of the self. L’Abbe’s incantatory repetition and melodic optimism complete a notative poetics of private thought, of public comeback, and of identity inscription. Greedy, and tender, like the mouth itself.

Excerpted from Killarnoe by Sonnet L'Abbe
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